Addie Wagenknecht, et al.: Deep Lab (2014)

“Deep Lab book is a compilation of reflections on digital culture, the post-Snowden Internet, and cyberfeminism. Created in five days by a dozen women, it represents the capstone to Deep Lab, a congress of cyberfeminist researchers, organized by Frank-Ratchye STUDIO Fellow Addie Wagenknecht to examine how the themes of privacy, security, surveillance, anonymity, and large-scale data aggregation are problematized in the arts, culture and society.

During the second week of December 2014, the Deep Lab participants—a group of internationally acclaimed new-media artists, information designers, data scientists, software engineers, hackers, writers, journalists and theoreticians—gathered to engage in critical assessments of contemporary digital culture. They worked collaboratively at the STUDIO in an accelerated pressure project, blending aspects of a booksprint, hackathon, dugnad, charrette, and a micro-conference. The outcomes of this effort include the visualizations, software, reflections and manifestos compiled in this book; an album of ten lecture presentations, the Deep Lab Lecture Series; and a documentary film featuring interviews with the Deep Lab participants.”

By Addie Wagenknecht, Allison Burtch, Claire L. Evans, Denise Caruso, Harlo Holmes, Ingrid Burrington, Jillian C. York, Jen Lowe, Kate Crawford, Lindsay Howard, Lorrie Faith Cranor & CUPS, Maddy Varner, Maral Pourkazemi, and Runa A. Sandvik.
Publisher Deep Lab and Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University, Dec 2014
Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 License
ISBN 978-1-312-77551-0
234 pages

Project website, (2)

PDF, PDF (109 MB, updated on 2018-4-14)
Deep Lab Lectures Series (10 videos, Dec 2014)
Documentary (18 min)

Marga Bijvoet: Art as Inquiry: Toward New Collaborations Between Art, Science, and Technology (1997) [EN, DE]

“Art as Inquiry is a pioneering yet under-recognized monographic study of art in the 1960s and early 1970s; Despite the subtitle, Bijvoet’s artistic concerns are not exclusively focused on science and technology, but rather with the “‘moving out’ into nature or the environment and the “moving ‘into technology’”: twin tendencies that, in her mind, stand out amidst the pluralism of 1960s art. She claims that these movements not only broke “the boundaries of art and … the commercial art world structure” but more importantly that environmental artists and tech artists both sought out and engaged in collaborations in which the artist “entered into a new relationship with the environment, space, public arena, onto the terrain of other sciences.”” (Edward A. Shanken)

Publisher Peter Lang, 1997
ISBN 0820433829, 9780820433820
x+283 pages

Review: Alan Dorin (2006).

WorldCat (EN)

Art as Inquiry (English, 1997, HTML, at Internet Archive)
Kunst-Forschung (German, n.d., HTML, at Internet Archive)

Sean Cubitt, Daniel Palmer, Nathaniel Tkacz (eds.): Digital Light (2015)

“Light symbolises the highest good, it enables all visual art, and today it lies at the heart of billion-dollar industries. The control of light forms the foundation of contemporary vision. Digital Light brings together artists, curators, technologists and media archaeologists to study the historical evolution of digital light-based technologies. Digital Light provides a critical account of the capacities and limitations of contemporary digital light-based technologies and techniques by tracing their genealogies and comparing them with their predecessor media. As digital light remediates multiple historical forms (photography, print, film, video, projection, paint), the collection draws from all of these histories, connecting them to the digital present and placing them in dialogue with one another.

Light is at once universal and deeply historical. The invention of mechanical media (including photography and cinematography) allied with changing print technologies (half-tone, lithography) helped structure the emerging electronic media of television and video, which in turn shaped the bitmap processing and raster display of digital visual media. Digital light is, as Stephen Jones points out in his contribution, an oxymoron: light is photons, particulate and discrete, and therefore always digital. But photons are also waveforms, subject to manipulation in myriad ways. From Fourier transforms to chip design, colour management to the translation of vector graphics into arithmetic displays, light is constantly disciplined to human purposes. In the form of fibre optics, light is now the infrastructure of all our media; in urban plazas and handheld devices, screens have become ubiquitous, and also standardised. This collection addresses how this occurred, what it means, and how artists, curators and engineers confront and challenge the constraints of increasingly normalised digital visual media.

While various art pieces and other content are considered throughout the collection, the focus is specifically on what such pieces suggest about the intersection of technique and technology. Including accounts by prominent artists and professionals, the collection emphasises the centrality of use and experimentation in the shaping of technological platforms. Indeed, a recurring theme is how techniques of previous media become technologies, inscribed in both digital software and hardware. Contributions include considerations of image-oriented software and file formats; screen technologies; projection and urban screen surfaces; histories of computer graphics, 2D and 3D image editing software, photography and cinematic art; and transformations of light-based art resulting from the distributed architectures of the internet and the logic of the database.”

Publisher Open Humanities Press, London, 2015
Fibreculture Books series
Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 License
ISBN 1785420089, 9781785420085
224 pages

Review: Mathias Denecke (Culture Machine, 2016).

Publisher
OAPEN
WorldCat

PDF, PDF, PDF (4 MB, updated on 2016-7-19)